The robot is always right: "Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!"
>From the spectacularly poorly-designed opening action sequence to the unaware self-parody of the closing credits, "Lost In Space" is spectacularly, almost hilariously, bad.
It's not just that writer Akiva Goldsman has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is a moron (as if the two last "Batman" films weren't damning enough). It's that the movie isn't even really a movie. It's a package, apparently designed to strip-mine a goofy yet loveable old TV show and regurgitate it as a... I don't know what... designed to appeal to adolescents. (A friend reports that his 13-year-old daughter enjoyed it.)
I would heartily recommend this film, yes recommend, to any and all film students and lovers of the cinema. Why? Because it's a veritable textbook on how *not* to make a movie. Do you have a 2.35 frame to use? Then be sure to cram the camera in so tight that the audience is gasping for breath! Don't forget to cut randomly in a way guaranteed to break the audience's eye fix! In fact, everything that happens on the unnamed "planet of random screen direction" is a "How Not To" of staging and editing. Brilliant!
But let's get back to what is laughingly referred to as the "script". Lesson number one: Make everybody talk just like the robot. I mean, there's a certain charm in having him speak his own exposition: "Crush, Kill Destroy!". But every single character in the movie talks like this, albeit with a few more articles of speech. And, to make sure nobody misses a single thought, the Penny character delivers her exposition as little soliloquies into a wrist recorder that shows up on our screen as "Penny Vision". I'm sure that Goldsman's idea of "subtext" is that thing on the bottom of the screen that lets other people understand Italian movies.
What merit there may have been in the effects is effectively destroyed by over-designed and poorly-considered shot layouts and the appearance of the most embarassingly bad CG character I've ever seen in a modern movie. And the camera work? Apparently the director saw a "lookat camera" on someone's workstation and fell in love with it. This is the crudest kind of CG camera in which the view is locked to a point in space or, in this case, a point on a CG character. The effect is to lock that one thing in space, and the camera changes it's view in exact synch with the character. It's something you use when doing tests or modeling, but it's not the way real cameras work. The way it's used in this movie is absurd.
As the energetically banal "update" of the theme song started over the credits, my mind's eye (obviously desparate for some sort of coherent image) conjured up Leonard Pinth-Garnell, from the old days at SNL. He took a slow drag on his smoke, turned to the camera and gleemed, "Deliciously bad."
I recommend it as a matinee, as long as you go in costume as either Crow or Tom Servo.
--Craig
good@pixar.com
Think Different. Write bad.
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